Here are two other notions which factored into these games’ design, or at least, as far as I can tell in retrospect, given that I was musing over them more-or-less during the design period.
1. For a couple of years, I’ve been thinking a lot about how many of the role-players I’ve met in the last decade had strict religious upbringings. Many although not all of them come from the American evangelical tradition. Maybe “strict” is misleading; I’ve found that people will say, “Oh, it wasn’t strict” and go on to describe hair-raising guilt trips and routine practices which are best described as behavior-mod indoctrination. In fact, I don’t mind telling you this up-front, the main thing I’ve found is that many role-players flatly lie when it comes to admitting how they were raised in these terms. Or they deflect into what might as well be a lie when they go on and on about their current free-thinking atheism or exceptionally fuzzy feel-good alternate church, as a way of not actually saying how they were raised.
Clinton was a Baptist from the holy-roller ‘Bama tradition. Vincent was a Mormon. Jim Henley was some sort of squeaky-clean evangelical Protestant, Presbyterian maybe or something like that. It goes on and on, nowadays with Joel, Kevin, Sydney, Clyde, and many others. And these are just the ones who are being up-front about their backgrounds. It doesn’t surprise me that at least some of them seem to congregate (heh) at Vincent’s blog, and I often get the idea that there’s a need being met there on a level which only makes sense to the people I’m talking about.
What I’m saying is that this is kind of an unspoken commonality or at least well-represented demographic which may well be a primary source from which RPG hobbyist culture is fed, every generation. I think role-playing for this demographic was the most daring and scary rebellious thing they were able to do, What I’m saying most especially is that openly discussing this issue is so chilled and so not honest that it chokes up and stifles many other discussions. Even those who are up-front about their backgrounds do so only in the context of saying how Not Like That they are now.
I’m not part of it, coming instead from the radical left coast from a very distinct and brief time period, hence part of a scene or subculture which has no corresponding members of older or younger vintage. As a similar example with different details, neither was Josh Neff, who’s a classic deep-red commie Jewish American, also a vanishing demographic. For us and a few others, role-playing wasn’t our way to rebel against mommy and daddy and God. Nor did BADD rear up as a meaningful threat to my participation in the hobby. I think that’s why my deeply underground, deeply politicized take on fantasy and sex (see Naked Went the Gamer) is so foreign to many role-players, and why I’m dismissive and bored regarding perceived mainstream views about role-playing, instead of fearing them.
The following points aren’t intended to describe any single individual, but two or three per person do seem to show up again and again among the role-players I’ve been thinking about.
i) A strong tendency toward rebellious-looking attire and hair, frequently hippie-pagan but also sometimes punky – and completely divorced from the original political context in which these looks originated.
ii) A strong tendency toward prudishness in RPG content once you get past the original rebellion of playing RPGs at all. It’s a weird kind of Victorian prudishness, though, perfectly accepting of extreme porn when it’s “in its place,” i.e., available in private and quite distanced from anything resembling ordinary or public human interactions.
iii) A strong tendency toward saving and helping others especially in anonymous masses, often in the full assumption that one knows exactly what to do and think better than they do. (i.e. despite breaking with one’s natal church, retaining and even elevating its presumption of secret spiritual insight over that of humanity; i.e., not joining the ignorant mass “down there” but rather elevating above the church to a third plane of super-insight)
iv) An overwhelming need, even anxiety, regarding being liked, as opposed merely to operating in one’s own terms and letting being liked find its own level.
v) Bright as hell, full of ideas, but often choked-up and anxious when it comes to implementing them.
vi) Surprising tolerance for militarism in details and even in full-blown political content, both in fiction and in life, to the extent of occasional fetishism and not recognizing military criticism or satire.
vii) A very strong commitment to a new name representing their break with their old upbringing, whether legally changed or a username or whatever.
Food for thought, perhaps.
2. Here’s a video of some of my recent talk at InterNosCon 2011: No one talks about religion in role-playing (the sound is crappy). The event was longer than 52 minutes; I figure the substantial talk lasted for another forty minutes or so, but I don’t know if the rest is going to be posted. Key points include:
i) “Religion” as a term needs to be broken into four independent components to make sense: belief, observance, institution, and culture. Again and again, the current discourse clearly displays the need to get past the first and to recognize it as a non-issue, especially the misconception that it provides the foundation for all the others. As I see it, getting past that first term means that we will recognize that the other three are glaringly present and involved in our lives. (My example in the talk: as a self-described non-religious person, with the most political and non-spiritual Unitarianism as the only formal influence, I wear a wedding band. I can rationalize it and babble about it all I want, but the point is that my culture is Christian, like it or not, and I am of it as well as merely being in it.)
ii) Texts used for religious books – especially the fragmentary older ones which have been folded into what can only be called “church books” – often say and depict nothing like what the church doctrines claim they do. When I sit down and read them without being distracted by doctrine, I find that they are often mainly about people: families, politics, sex, power, obligations, cheating, and all that stuff, and frequently taken to rather shocking extremes. My take is that a very great deal of human discourse about really quite relevant issues has been conducted through such texts, and to reject or abandon familiarity with them on the basis of objecting to the metaphysics would be a stupid thing to do. Note that this point is not the same as the common desires to uncover the “real” religion through seeking backwards through texts, or to discover historical authenticity or lack thereof through such seeking. Those aims don’t interest me very much.
iii) Religion in RPG settings is generally flawed to the point of absence, especially in the adventuring-party context of D&D-type fantasy, mercenary high-tech like Shadowrun, and anything based on those. Either it provides a skill-set for utility purposes or a setting-context for villainy. The main exceptions I identified were the Glorantha setting, especially in the post-millenial games starting with Hero Wars; the Church of the Celestial Sun in Fading Suns; and a couple of others I’m probably forgetting. Davide Losito (in the video, sitting to my right) offered some examples of churches used as centers of resistance against tyranny.
iv) The first content revolution in RPG play/design in the past 15 years concerned substantive drama as opposed to faking it; the second concerned sexual and gender content which acknowledged the reality of these issues for people at the table; and the third, already in progress, concerns both politics and religion as genuine human concerns. The third is receiving exactly the same combination of resistance and eager reception as the first two did, although my current thinking is that the barrier is actually higher in this case because the exact same people in the RPG community who want relevant content are the same ones who like to pretend they are above politics and religion. So far, the games in question for politics include carry, Spione, Steal Away Jordan, and Grey Ranks; the ones for religion include Montsegur 1244 and Thou Art But a Warrior, and I’m probably missing a couple. I suggest that Dogs in the Vineyard is a case study with special properties but we can save that for later posts.